Shortlisted for the Andrew
Carnegie Medal for Excellence in NonfictionFinalist for The California
Book Award in NonfictionThe San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year ListForeign Affairs Best Books of the Year
In These Times “Best Books of the Year"Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List LitHub's “Five Books Making
News This Week”
Publisher’s Abstract:From the legendary
whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of
the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that
continues to this day.
Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg
reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the
1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered
that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to
the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed,
would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of
this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its
proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival.
No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear
strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has
fundamentally changed since that era.

Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges
participating--this gripping exposéreads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to
dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear
catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story
and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our
country, but the future of the world.

Reviews

“The Doomsday Machine is being published at an alarmingly
relevant moment, as North Korea is seeking the capability to target the United
States with nuclear missiles, and an unpredictable president, Donald Trump, has
countered with threats of 'fire and fury.'” – New York Magazine

“A groundbreaking and
nightmare-inducing account of how the whole mad system
works.” – Esquire

“One of the best books
ever written on the subject--certainly the most honest and revealing account by
an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole's mad logic and came
out the other side.” – Fred Kaplan, Slate

“Ellsberg, the dauntless
whistle-blower, has written a timely plea for a reassessment of a weapons
program that he describes as 'institutionalized madness.'” – Best Books of the Year
2017, The San Francisco Chronicle

“A passionate call for
reducing the risk of total destruction . . . Ellsberg's effort to make vivid
the genuine madness of the 'doomsday machine,' and the foolishness of betting
our survival on mutually assured destruction, is both commendable and
important.” – Editor's Choice, New York Times Book
Review

“Brilliantly and
readably tackles an issue even more crucial than decision-making in the U.S.
intervention in Vietnam, which is policy on the handling of nuclear
weapons.” – 10 Excellent December Books, Huffington Post

“This candid and
chilling memoir describes how Ellsberg came to recognize that the U.S.
military's approach to preparing for nuclear war was terrifyingly casual. If
war came, the United States was ready to obliterate not only the Soviet Union
but also China--a plan that would have immediately produced 275 million
fatalities and then led to another 50 million, owing to the effects of
radiation.” – Foreign Affairs, "Best Books of the
Year"

“Ellsberg's brilliant
and unnerving account makes a convincing case for disarmament and shows that
the mere existence of nuclear weapons is a serious threat to humanity.” – starred review, Publishers
Weekly

“Noted gadfly Ellsberg
returns with a sobering look at our nuclear capabilities . . . When the author
hurriedly copied the contents of his RAND Corporation safe to reveal, in time,
what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, that was just the start of it.
He had other documents, even more jarring . . . Especially timely given the
recent saber-rattling not from Russia but North Korea and given the apparent
proliferation of nuclear abilities among other small powers.” – Kirkus Reviews

“His point is simple: We
and our political leaders must stop thinking of nuclear war as a manageable
risk. We must stop thinking of the possibility of nuclear war as
normal.” – St Louis Post-Dispatch, "Our Favorite
Books of 2017"

“The Doomsday Machine:
Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner blends personal recollections and historical analysis with a
set of considered proposals for reducing the threat of apocalyptic war. Many
years in the making, it's a book that arrives at an opportune moment.” – San Francisco Chronicle

“Ellsberg's book,
perhaps the most personal memoir yet from a Cold Warrior, fills an important
void by providing firsthand testimony about the nuclear insanity that gripped a
generation of policymakers . . . The Doomsday Machine is strongest as a portrait of the slow
corruption of America's national security state by layer upon layer of secrecy.
He relates how the Cold War, the nuclear build-up and trillions of dollars of
defense spending were compromised by information purposely withheld from the
policymakers and politicians who debated and shaped our
path” – Washington Post

“History may remember
Ellsberg as the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers and helped end the
Vietnam War, but his alarmingly relevant new book should also assure his legacy
as a prescient and authoritative anti-nuclear activist. The Doomsday Machine, which takes its title from Dr. Strangelove,
reads like a thriller as Ellsberg figures out that America's pledge never to
attack first was fiction and that the so called 'fail-safe' systems are prone
to disaster.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

“Ellsberg writes briskly
in the service of opinions formed by long and sober study. What he means is
never in doubt and it is always interesting . . . He is a vigorous writer with
a gift for dramatic tension and the unfolding of events as they cascade toward
disaster.” – Thomas Powers, New York Review of
Books

“Ellsberg presents his
thoughts on how best to dismantle a program that could lead to global annihilation,
while once again proving how deeply disturbing and radically ignorant our
country's leaders are when it comes to thermonuclear
warfare.” – SF Weekly

“Is it really necessary
to declare that a knowledgeable, detailed and passionate book about the odds-on
danger of cataclysmically destroying all human life on earth is important?
Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine demands to be widely read. Its claims should be examined by
experts, corroborated, rebutted, taken up by Congressional committees (alas,
unlikely) and generally forced into public consciousness . . . The Doomsday Machine is engrossing and
frightening.” – Peter Steinfels, America Magazine

“In the era of barbed
insults regarded as precursors to nuclear threat, the warnings yielded by The Doomsday Machine have become required reading. . . . Daniel
Ellsberg's title evokes Kubrick's film on purpose, a metaphor that culminates
in his definition of the 'Strangelove Paradox.' The United States has thousands
of 'Doomdsay Machine' weapons and hundreds of 'fingers on the button.' The
question the reader must ask, now mortified by the necessary horrors of
Ellsberg's masterpiece, is how to save the world” – Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

“The Doomsday Machine is, in fact, a Bildungsroman, a tale of
one intellectual's disillusionment with the country in which Ellsberg had
placed so much trust. It reveals how the horrors of US nuclear war planning transformed
a man of the establishment into a left-wing firebrand.” – Los Angeles Times

“[The Doomsday Machine is] an important tome that's as optimistic
as it sounds. It's vital reading that reminds people that both poor
planning--such as the US under Dwight Eisenhower having no contingency in place
for only bombing the USSR into dust, but it being a package deal with China,
something that confirmed the rigidity of these planners as well as their
blithely democidal tendencies--and the potential for simple mistakes still run
rampant in US nuclear policy.” – antiwar.com

“Given the current
crises, both domestic and international, the timeliness of Ellsberg's
exposures-and warnings-is unnerving... The Doomsday Machine is not for the faint of heart, but its
sense of urgency should make it required reading, and-more importantly-a call
to action.” – BookPage

“From a close insider's
perspective, he describes how the U.S. came to create and adjust this
potentially world-destroying arsenal, how presidents have used it to threaten
foreign leaders, and the responses of other nuclear powers. We have narrowly
avoided many previous crises, but he fears that the current U.S. administration
could charge straight into a worst-case scenario. This book deserves to be
widely read, discussed and acted upon.” – Shelf Awareness

“In his recent book The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg reports that the basic
elements of US preparations for nuclear war have been little changed over the
past three generations . . . Ellsberg's warning needs to be taken
seriously.” – Truthout

In 1982, a 40-year-old insurance salesman who sold policies to
professional athletes traveled from his home in Lawrence, Kansas, to New York
City on a business trip. Shortly before he left, Bob Swan, Jr.—the father of
two young daughters, and a man increasingly concerned about the possibility of
a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union—mentioned to his
then-wife Jane that he had had a dream about a film that portrayed an American
family and a Russian family in the aftermath of nuclear war and “showed the
total absurdity” of such a war. While he was in New York, Swan attended a huge
march for nuclear disarmament that was life-changing for him. “When I got back
from this amazing experience,” Swan told me when I visited him at his home a
few months ago, one of the first things his wife said was: “They announced
while you were gone, they’re going to make that film you dreamed about. They’re
going to film it in Lawrence.”

The television movie The Day After depicted a
full-scale nuclear war and its impacts on people living in and around Kansas
City. It became something of a community project in picturesque Lawrence, 40
miles west of Kansas City, where much of the movie was filmed. Thousands of
local residents—including students and faculty from the University of
Kansas—were recruited as extras for the movie; about 65 of the 80 speaking
parts were cast locally. The use of locals was intentional, because the
moviemakers wanted to show the grim consequences of a nuclear war for real
middle Americans, living in the real middle of the country. By the time the
movie ends, almost all of the main characters are dead or dying.

ABC broadcast The Day After on November 20,
1983, with no commercial breaks during the final hour. More than 100 million
people saw it—nearly two-thirds of the total viewing audience. It
remains one of the most-watched television
programs of all time. Brandon Stoddard, then-president of ABC’s motion picture
division, called it “the most important movie we’ve
ever done.” The Washington Post later described it as “a profound TV
moment.” It was arguably the most effective public service announcement in history.

“For those of us who live in Lawrence, it
was personal... and it didn’t have a happy ending.”

It was also a turning point for foreign policy. Thirty-five
years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union were in a nuclear arms race
that had taken them to the brink of war. The Day After was a
piercing wakeup shriek, not just for the general public but also for
then-President Ronald Reagan. Shortly after he saw the film, Reagan gave
a speech saying that he, too, had a dream:
that nuclear weapons would be “banished from the face of the Earth.” A few
years later, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the first agreement that
provided for the elimination of an entire category of nuclear weapons. By the
late 1990s, American and Russian leaders had created a stable, treaty-based
arms-control infrastructure and expected it to continue improving over time.

Now, however, a long era of nuclear restraint appears to be
nearing an end. Tensions between the United States and Russia have risen to
levels not seen in decades. Alleging treaty violations by Russia, the White
House has announced plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty. Both countries are
moving forward with the enormously expensive refurbishment of old and
development of new nuclear weapons—a process euphemized as “nuclear
modernization.” Leaders on both sides have made inflammatory statements, and no
serious negotiations have taken place in recent years.MORE

“A number of studies by meteorologists and other experts from
both East and West predict that use of nuclear weapons would result in fire
storms with very high winds and high temperatures. The resulting smoke and dust
would block out sunlight for a period of many months. Temperatures in many
places would fall far below freezing, and much of the earth’s plant life would
be killed. Animals and humans would then die of starvation.”Nuclear Weapons: An
Absolute Evil, by John Scales Avery, Danish Peace Academy, 25 Jan 2018https://www.annebaring.com/anbar73_bookreview.html

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin
issued a warning. As the New York Times described it: “If the United States deploys new intermediate-range missiles
in Europe after withdrawing from a nuclear treaty prohibiting these weapons,
European nations will be at risk of ‘a possible counterstrike.’” It was the
sort of threat that, in the previous century, would have raised the level of
everyday nuclear fears in this society, too. I remember them well -- from the “duck-and-cover” experiences of schoolchildren huddling under desks that were somehow to protect them from nuclear
annihilation to the vivid nightmares of my teen years. (Yes, in a dream at
least, I saw and felt an atomic blast.) This was the world of the Cold War in
which I grew up.

I’ve always believed
that the last of such Cold War nuclear fears manifested themselves on September
11, 2001, when those towers in lower Manhattan collapsed amid a horrifying cloud of smoke and ash -- and the place
where it all happened was promptly christened Ground Zero, a term previously
reserved for the spot where a nuclear blast had gone off. Somehow, on that day,
something was called back to life from those Cold War years in which
newspapers regularly drew imagined concentric circles of atomic destruction from
fantasy Ground Zeros in American cities, while magazines offered visions of our
country as a vaporized wasteland. In the chaos and destruction of that moment,
there was perhaps a subliminal feeling that the U.S., the first country
to use an
atomic weapon, had finally experienced some kind of payback. As Tom Brokaw,
chairing NBC's nonstop news coverage, said that day, it looked “like
a nuclear winter in lower Manhattan."

In Donald Trump’s
upside-down world, the trek of a few thousand desperate migrants, some carrying
tiny children or even babies, across thousands of miles of Honduras, Guatemala,
and now Mexico is treated as if it were potentially a major invasion of (if not
a nuclear attack on) the United States. As the president dispatches the U.S. military to the border, claims that
ISIS-like Middle Easterners lurk in that caravan, and blames the
Democrats for it all, who has time to think about an actual catastrophe?

Fortunately, TomDispatch regularMichael Klare does and he has news for us. As the U.S. prepares to withdraw from a classic Cold War nuclear treaty, it’s time to start
ramping up those fears again. After all, we’re now in a new world of expanding
global rivalries and potential madness in which impoverished migrants from
Honduras are the least of our problems. Tom

When it comes to
relations between Donald Trump’s America, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Xi
Jinping’s China, observers everywhere are starting to talk about a return to an
all-too-familiar past. “Now we have a new Cold War,” commented Russia expert Peter Felgenhauer in Moscow after President
Trump recently announced plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty. The Trump administration is "launching a new Cold
War," said historian
Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal, following a series
of anti-Chinese measures approved by the president in October. And many others
are already chiming in.

Recent steps by
leaders in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing may seem to lend credence to such a
“new Cold War” narrative, but in this case history is no guide. Almost two
decades into the twenty-first century, what we face is not some mildly updated
replica of last century’s Cold War, but a new and potentially even more
dangerous global predicament.

The original Cold War, which lasted from the
late 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, posed a colossal
risk of thermonuclear annihilation. At least after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, however, it also proved a remarkably stable
situation in which, despite local conflicts of many sorts, the United States
and the Soviet Union both sought to avoid the kinds of direct confrontations
that might have triggered a mutual catastrophe. In fact, after confronting the abyss in 1962, the leaders of both superpowers engaged in a
complex series of negotiations leading to substantial reductions in their
nuclear arsenals and agreements intended to reduce the risk of a future Armageddon.

What others are now
calling the New Cold War -- but I prefer to think of as a new global tinderbox
-- bears only the most minimal resemblance to that earlier period. As before,
the United States and its rivals are engaged in an accelerating arms race,
focused on nuclear and “conventional” weaponry of ever-increasing range,
precision, and lethality. All three countries, in characteristic Cold War
fashion, are also lining up allies in what increasingly looks like a global
power struggle.

But the similarities
end there. Among the differences, the first couldn’t be more obvious: the U.S.
now faces two determined adversaries, not one, and a far more complex global
conflict map (with a corresponding increase in potential nuclear flashpoints).
At the same time, the old boundaries between “peace” and “war” are rapidly
disappearing as all three rivals engage in what could be thought of as combat
by other means, including trade wars and cyberattacks that might set the stage
for far greater violence to follow. To compound the danger, all three big
powers are now engaging in provocative acts aimed at “demonstrating resolve” or
intimidating rivals, including menacing U.S. and Chinese naval maneuvers off Chinese-occupied islands in the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, rather than pursue the sort of arms-control agreements that tempered
Cold War hostilities, the U.S. and Russia appear intent on tearing up existing
accords and launching a new nuclear arms race.

These factors could
already be steering the world ever closer to a new Cuban Missile Crisis, when
the world came within a hairsbreadth of nuclear incineration. This one,
however, could start in the South China Sea or even in the Baltic region, where
U.S. and Russian planes and ships are similarly engaged in regular
near-collisions.

Michael T. Klare,
a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college
professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and
a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His next book, All
Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and American National
Security, will be published in
2019.

·Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save
Itself--While the Rest of Us Die.By Garrett
M. Graff.Simon and Schuster, 2017.

The eye-opening true story of the government’s secret plans to
survive and rebuild after a catastrophic attack on US soil—a narrative that
spans from the dawn of the nuclear age to today.

Every day in Washington, DC, the blue-and-gold 1st Helicopter Squadron,
code-named “MUSSEL,” flies over the Potomac River. As obvious as the
presidential motorcade, the squadron is assumed by most people to be a travel
perk for VIPs. They’re only half right: while the helicopters do provide
transport, the unit exists to evacuate high-ranking officials in the event of a
terrorist or nuclear attack on the capital. In the event of an attack, select
officials would be whisked by helicopters to a ring of secret bunkers around
Washington, even as ordinary citizens are left to fend for themselves.

For sixty years, the US government has been developing secret Doomsday plans to
protect itself, and the multibillion-dollar Continuity of Government (COG)
program takes numerous forms—from its plans to evacuate the Liberty Bell from
Philadelphia and our most precious documents from the National Archives to the
plans to launch nuclear missiles from a Boeing 747 jet flying high over
Nebraska.

In Raven Rock, Garrett Graff sheds light on the inner workings of
the 650-acre compound (called Raven Rock) just miles from Camp David, as well
as dozens of other bunkers the government built its top leaders during the Cold
War, from the White House lawn to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado to Palm Beach,
Florida, and the secret plans that would have kicked in after a Cold War
nuclear attack to round up foreigners and dissidents, and nationalize
industries.

Equal parts a presidential, military, and political history, Raven Rock tracks
the evolution of the government’s plans and the threats of global war from the
dawn of the nuclear era through the present day. Relying upon thousands of
pages of once-classified documents, as well as original interviews and visits
to former and current COG facilities, Graff brings readers through the back
channels of government to understand exactly what is at stake if our nation is
attacked, and how we’re prepared to respond if it is.

From one of our
leading social thinkers, a compelling
case for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

During his impeachment
proceedings, Richard Nixon boasted, "I can go into my office and pick up
the telephone and in twenty-five minutes seventy million people will be
dead." Nixon was accurately describing not only his own power but also the
power of every American president in the nuclear age.

Presidents Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon each contemplated using nuclear weapons—Eisenhower
twice, Kennedy three times, Johnson once, Nixon four times. Whether later
presidents, from Ford to Obama, considered using them we will learn only once
their national security papers are released.

In this incisive,
masterfully argued new book, award-winning social theorist Elaine Scarry
demonstrates that the power of one leader to obliterate millions of people with
a nuclear weapon—a possibility that remains very real even in the wake of the
Cold War—deeply violates our constitutional rights, undermines the social
contract, and is fundamentally at odds with the deliberative principles of
democracy.

According to the
Constitution, the decision to go to war requires rigorous testing by both
Congress and the citizenry; when a leader can single-handedly decide to deploy
a nuclear weapon, we live in a state of “thermonuclear monarchy,” not
democracy.

The danger of nuclear
weapons comes from potential accidents or acquisition by terrorists, hackers,
or rogue countries. But the gravest danger comes from the mistaken idea that
there exists some case compatible with legitimate governance. There can be no
such case. Thermonuclear Monarchy shows
the deformation of governance that occurs when a country gains nuclear weapons.

In bold and lucid
prose, Thermonuclear Monarchy identifies the tools that
will enable us to eliminate nuclear weapons and bring the decision for war back
into the hands of Congress and the people. Only by doing so can we secure the
safety of home populations, foreign populations, and the earth itself.

BOOK
DETAILS

·Hardcover

·February 2014

·6.5 × 9.6 in / 592
pages

ENDORSEMENTS
& REVIEWS

“Eloquent.” — Richard Rhodes, The New York Times

“The premise of this book is as relevant as it
is horrifying, that the power to inflict great harm doesn’t belong to those
that it supposedly protects. I congratulate Elaine Scarry on her intellectual
courage and moral clarity and in proposing the only possible way out.” —
Marcelo Gleiser, author of A Tear at the Edge of Creation

“A really remarkable work, ranging across
ethics, law and politics to pose genuinely radical challenges to the confused
and potentially lethal systems that pass for democracy in our world. A
painfully timely intervention.” — Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College,
Cambridge and former Archbishop of Canterbury

“Elaine Scarry offers a coruscating critique
of current policies, arguing that they are antithetic to the spirit of the U.S.
constitution, and indeed to basic democratic principles. This eloquent and
scholarly book offers a compelling case for swifter progress toward their
elimination.” — Martin Rees, astronomer royal of England

“Even someone unpersuaded by Elaine Scarry’s
constitutional analysis cannot avoid being gripped by her stark depiction of
how utterly incompatible our eighteenth-century constitutional structure and
the social contract it embodies are with our twenty-first-century weapons of
mass destruction, weapons that can annihilate tens of millions of human souls
in the blink of an eye and at the whim of a single individual, consulting with
no one. A sober and haunting meditation on this tension between our
institutions and our capacities, Scarry’s book requires any thoughtful reader
to revisit the basic postulates and the deepest human purposes of our system of
government.” — Laurence H. Tribe, professor of constitutional law, Harvard Law
School

“A few years ago General Lee Butler, former
head of the U.S. Strategic Command, condemned the ‘faith in nuclear weapons’ to
which his life had been wrongly dedicated and the ‘breathtaking audacity’ in
maintaining them when ‘we should stand trembling in the face of our folly and
united in our commitment to abolish its most deadly manifestations.’ In this
fascinating study, Elaine Scarry adds rich historical, philosophical, literary,
and legal depth to Butler’s grim warnings, with novel and provocative insights.
That we have escaped disaster so far is a near miracle. Scarry’s remarkable
contribution should inspire us to abolish this colossal folly.” — Noam Chomsky

“Scarry’s assault on the reigning complacency about
nuclear weapons rests on her belief in the capacity of an interpretation to
reconfigure the world.” — Nathan Schneider, Chronicle of Higher Education

“Thermonuclear Monarchy is
a work of deadly serious political science by an analyst dwelling on the constitutional
implications of giving a democratically elected president sovereign-like
autocracy.” — Nick Smith, Engineering & Technology (U.K.)

“Scarry’s book requires any thoughtful reader
to revisit the basic postulates and the deepest human purposes of our system of
government.” — Laurence H. Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law
School

I have been filming in the
Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If
I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini
swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini Island.
Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall
Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day
for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated
and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing
moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with
radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched
the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the
crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned
people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return
journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine
called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini
swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few
days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very
different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other
life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the
magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a
rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a
warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us.
The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as
“the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of
democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people are aware that a
world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and
distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order,
the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood
before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He
pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered
and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was
subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has
built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery
systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose
higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty
years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned.
It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General
James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has
said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the
greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United
States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a
demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet
Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev,
Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to
Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures
in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists.
They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the
Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West,
or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
— next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks,
heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is
met with silence in the West.

What makes the
prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel
campaign against China.MORE

Two dangerous new
appointments by President Trump have added even more urgency to the effort to
take away the president’s ability to use nuclear weapons first.

John Bolton is an
extreme hawk, and is set to become National Security Advisor on April 9.
He has advocated military action against North Korea and Iran. Bolton was a
top advocate of the regime change war in Iraq in 2003, which has had
catastrophic consequences for Iraq and the wider Middle East, as well as for
the U.S. His unbridled enthusiasm to repeat the debacle of preventive
military action and regime change in both North Korea and Iran is a huge concern.
Bolton’s new position unfortunately does not require Senate confirmation.

Trump also nominated
Mike Pompeo to become the new U.S. Secretary of State. Pompeo is a staunch
opponent of the nuclear deal that was negotiated among the U.S., Iran,
Russia, UK, France, China, and Germany. In July 2017, Pompeo spoke in favor
of regime change in North Korea. He said, “I am hopeful we will find a way to
separate the [North Korean] regime from this [nuclear weapons] system… The
North Korean people, I’m sure, are lovely people and would love to see him
go.” A regime change war in North Korea would put the lives of millions of
people across Northeast Asia, including U.S. soldiers and civilians, at risk.

While our members of
Congress cannot do anything to block Bolton’s appointment, the Senate does
have to confirm Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State.

Having Pompeo as our
nation’s top diplomat would be disastrous. The Iran deal showed the power of
diplomacy and true negotiations. Scrapping it would harm U.S. relations with the
rest of the world, especially in the current opportunity for making progress
with North Korea. U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal would cast doubt on all
international agreements we have made in the past and will try to make in the
future.

Please take a moment
to contact your senators and urge them to vote “no” to Mike
Pompeo as U.S. Secretary of State, and let them know that you support Sen. Ed
Markey’s bill to restrict the president’s first use of nuclear weapons.